Northwestern football has them all doing the one thing they don't want to be doing and that is talking about Northwestern football for an extra week. The Wildcats did this by remaining standing atop a Big Ten West where every team poisoned itself, by playing a brand of ugly, unwatchable football, and scoring very close to the minimum number of points needed to do so. They are 8-4, lost every single non-conference game including one to a four-win Akron team that had literally never beaten a Big Ten Opponent, and sported a losing record at home. SBNation calls them the "lowest-rated power five team to ever win a division championship." Pat Fizgerald has been named Big Ten Coach of the Year; they are sixty minutes away from winning the Big Ten and going to the Rose Bowl. I had no idea the Big Ten West Champion got a trophy until this year Every advanced metric seems to cry out that the 2018 Northwestern Wildcats suck. And yet, nobody wants to see their team play them. This is partly because Northwestern plays aesthetically revolting football loved by punters and the punters who love punters. Northwestern has a great punter who has also been kicking field goals because it is his turn to score some points and at Northwestern, the punter is king. The Wildcats were bound to break through to Indianapolis at some point, and this is the platonic ideal of a Northwestern team to do so-- reviled, appearing seemingly by default, irritating the hell out of everyone especially Big Ten West teams whose own vile and inept outfits managed to fall short. This is what Northwestern football looks like under Pat Fitzgerald-- not the Randy Walker squads that used the then-novel spread offense to try to beat teams 61-55, but a brutal, grinding, defense and punts machine that has sprung fully formed from the meaty forearms of a neckroll linebacker. Northwestern hangs in against great teams and they rarely blow anyone out. In the last five years of Fitzball in which Northwestern has had arguably its strongest run of the modern era including multiple ten-win seasons and heretofore unthinkable bowl victories, the 'Cats have made almost every clutch play they've needed-- they are probably a few dozen minutes from going like 3-9 every year. For a long time, opposing teams would react to losing to Northwestern
like frustrated cartoon supervillains, shaking their fists and
perplexed that their plans had once again gone awry. It was mildly
infuriating that teams could lose again and again to the Wildcats and
their fans would be incredulous because Northwestern had been really bad
in the 1970s and 80s. How could people not fathom that Northwestern is
sort of good? They put up a spirited fight in the Sun Bowl. But not this
year. Everyone is infuriated they lost to Northwestern because
Northwestern punted 75 times and then a wide receiver teleported into
the endzone or they fumbled and the ball bounced into a roll and hit the
pole, and knocked the ball in the rub-a-dub tub, which hit the man into
the pan, the trap is set, Northwestern ball. Northwestern Offensive Coordinator Mick McCall draws up the "Win The Game" play
The metrics and pundits have no way to quantify exactly good enough, and the Wildcats in Big Ten play have made pretty much exactly every play they needed to at the right time. Maybe it's luck, maybe it is a conference gerrymandered for Wisconsin watching as Wisconsin realizes only too late that Ryan Field is inexplicably a Badger Death Trap, and maybe it is because the Wildcats have some sort of bizarre intangible toughness that allows them to grind out games like this while causing the S&P+ computers to overheat and become sentient, eventually going on an endless wave of destruction. All I know is that the Wildcats are in Indianapolis, the bumbling jabronis of the Big Ten West are not, and I would not write them off. THE INCIDENTAL HAT If hideous, unwatchable victories characterize this Northwestern season, then the 24-16 victory over a malingering Illinois team was their masterpiece. The Wildcats bludgeoned the Illini with Isaiah Bowser; the Illini run defense seemed mainly to consist of reasoned argument. But then, Fitzgerald took everyone out. The 'Cats already played the game with no starting defensive backs, no top receiver, and without a key defensive playmaker. Early in the third quarter, Fitz benched Bowser, and by the fourth had benched Clayton Thorson. The offense basically decided to kneel for the rest of the game, and Illinois inched back with a great game from quarterback A.J. Bush. Fitzgerald decided to win the Hat with one head tied behind his back. And once again Mystical Northwestern Bullshit struck again. Part of it came from Illinois just being a woeful and sorry football team that couldn't stop committing doofus penalties; the game ended on a first down granted from a personal foul. Part of it came from Lovie Smith stoically electing to kick field goals instead of raining touchdown hellfire in order to try to salvage some dignity by seizing the Hat from the division champs. Even me, a person who has written thousands of words about retaining the Hat, was screaming at Lovie for kicking a field goal inside the five, a luxury I could enjoy because the game had no bearing on Northwestern's conference championship position, and a loss would only give them a another truly hideous and embarrassing defeat to drag into Indianapolis and theoretically make them even more powerful. Using archival photos of Lovie as the head coach of the Bears, this blog has expertly recreated what would happen if Lovie shaved his mustache and grew a Lincoln Beard, perhaps the most effective way for him to win his first Hat
I like Lovie Smith a lot. He was a great Bears coach and always struck me as a beacon of calm in the manic football coaching world. I have no idea why Illinois has played so poorly under him and, it pains me to say this, but Tim Beckman would have absolutely won that game. He would have won that game, he would have gotten the Hat, and then he probably would have spontaneously combusted while screaming at his players all the way back to Champaign-Urbana only because he understood the power of the Hat and it drove him into madness. FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE II The last time Northwestern and Ohio State met on a stage this big, ESPN's College Football Gameday came to Evanston. Northwestern was 4-0, coming off its first bowl win in the NATO era, and seemingly poised for a big run in the Legends Division that I still can't believe that multiple people saw that and said that was an acceptable name for a division, sure we'll put it on merchandise and trophies and everything. Instead, Ohio State eked out the win and Northwestern fell into an unfathomable death spiral where they managed a single win the rest of the season. This meeting is projected to be more bleak. He got the First Down This game has Playoff Implications. Because the college football playoff is decided by an unaccountable committee that selects playoff participants from secret chambers with ghastly rites and unthinkable augurs, Ohio State may still qualify. There is no objective way to determine whether, for example, it is better to have Oklahoma's defense where they try to tackle people and then fly back on wires like in kung fu movies or to have gotten annihilated from the face of the Earth by Purdue. The Playoff Committee deals in conjecture, in ratings and money, and just plain old bullshit. But Ohio State will only make the Playoff if they beat Northwestern, and they have every incentive to try to run it up as much as possible. Unfortunately for them, Northwestern football this season is an inflatable clown that keeps popping up. Conventional wisdom says that the Buckeyes will run away with this one. But they do not fully understand the force they are dealing with. Northwestern's 2018 football team was not designed to get blown out, clobbered, or run out of Lucas Oil Stadium. It makes no sense. It defies all logic, reason, and empirical ranking systems, and only exists to profoundly annoy and fuck up college football. Ohio State has the best quarterback in the Big Ten and a high-powered offense. Northwestern has the ability to show up to the Rose Bowl and get asked what the fuck are you doing here before a 25-minute phone conversation clears things up and the Tournament of Roses people react with Marc Maron levels of incredulity. There can be nothing less likely or more ridiculous than Northwestern pulling this one out. Tell the Buckeyes the Wildcats will see them in Indianapolis, they will see them in hell, and they will see them in Overtime.
Pat Fitzgerald has a saying he likes to bleat out from time to time: "stats are for losers." This sort of sentiment comes partly from Fitzgerald's frustration from feeling overlooked and underrated due in part to Northwestern's historical ineptitude, a bizarre and thin-skinned fascination with media figures (it will always remain a mystery to me why he spent so much time calling out some ESPN guy I've never heard of repeatedly for daring to pick Pitt in the Pinstripe Bowl), and a sort of cheeky macho posturing where Pat Fitzgerald feels the need to act like the model of his look, a gritty, middle-aged Duke Nukem. And yet one of the curious things about Fitzgerald's tenure as head coach has been a consistent gulf between Northwestern's rating by various advanced statistical metrics and the team's performance. This comes from a bizarre pattern where the Wildcats struggle against a coterie of profoundly non-threatening foes like the Central Eastern Corner of Illinois Feeblemen or Jabroni Technical College before somehow roaring back to life against Big Ten opponents, all of whom are defeated by seven points or less if they cannot be dragged into Northwestern's overtime chamber. This season, Northwestern has somehow risen to win a profoundly troubled conference and play in the Big Ten Championship game; SBNation/Football Outsiders' S&P+ ratings say that the Wildcats are the 76th best team in the country. College football can work this way because football itself is a bizarre and impossible game where the outcome of games can hinge on one or two plays, and Northwestern has made nearly all of them. “They beat teams just like that," P.J. Fleck said about last week's loss. "Iceman from ‘Top Gun,’ for all the people who know that. Cool as ice. Never makes a mistake." "I.C.E.M.A.N." Fleck said. "Intensity. Coolness. Execution. Mangling. Anklyosaurus. Neurotransmitters." I also want to point out the incredible next paragraph from the Star Tribune article where I got the Fleck quote from columnist Jim Souhan: "Most of Fleck’s speechifying targets 18-year-olds who may be impressed
by such silliness. Iceman from ‘Top Gun’? I may have been one of the few
people in the room old enough to know what he was talking about, yet I
had no idea what he was talking about. He might as well have been
comparing Northwestern to Gatsby, or Shemp." The season is short or, in statistics jargon, the samples are small. With the exception of the world-devouring Alabamas of the world, it is very difficult to tell if a team is better than another, and because of the nature of the game, it is almost impossible to predict if a team will beat another team or whether a team is better. Fans and pundits have several strategies to deal with the ambiguity baked into college football. One way is to try to build empirical models and rankings. The other way is through rhetoric, logical fallacies, transitive property wins, television analysts with tie knots so large that they are orbited by smaller tie knots going on television and talking about the Positional Matchups with grim certainty even though they have absolutely no idea how any of this is going to play out, ad finally people screaming at each other. There is also the tried and true method of Plushomancy, divination by Giant Mascot Head And yet, one of the strange epistemological paradoxes in sports in general, but particularly in college football, is that you could build a computer that takes of several acres with whirling tape machines and people dressed like NASA ground crews scurrying around with armfuls of printout graphs that could tell you precisely how good every team is and it has no effect on what actually happens. The central question surrounding Northwestern football this season is: why? And also: how? A Northwestern team that has not looked particularly impressive has amassed enough ugly wins over the exact configuration of teams it needed to beat to win the West. Have they been profoundly lucky? Do they have some sort of transcendent clutch switch that allows them to make the exact play they need to make at the exact instant they need to make it and no other time? Are they the avatars of a cursed football deity, brought forth by the unholy addition of Rutgers and Maryland brought in to smite the maniacs who dared to divide the Big Ten into this precise configuration of divisions by forcing Jim Delany to watch Northwestern play in the championship game? There are some answers. Northwestern's early-season struggles came from an offense juggling two quarterbacks as Clayton Thorson returned from his horrifying knee injury. Then, star running back Jeremy Larkin retired, and the Wildcats' running game stalled until the emergence of freshman battering ram Isaiah Bowser. Wisconsin played Northwestern with a quarterback making his debut. Kirk Ferentz is being held hostage by a Speed-inspired madman who has threatened to destroy Kinnick Stadium if the Hawkeyes go above eight wins. Northwestern refuses to blow anyone out because the program is in the grips of an overtime cult.
Regardless of what the numbers say or what cavalcade of coincidences and clutch play has allowed Northwestern to make it this far, the fact is that they are the Big Ten West Champions. They cannot be stopped from playing in the Conference Championship Game by anyone. And should they do it one more time, they look at the numbers and the statistics and Pat Fitzgerald prints them out and rips them apart on the sidelines like the time he had the team destroy a stuffed animal monkey when they finally won a bowl game, they would be finally proving once and for all that beating Ohio State or Michigan and knocking the entire conference out of the playoff would be extremely funny. SOFTENING THE CLAIMS TO THE HAT With the big Hat Showdown coming once again, it is important to point out that the state of Illinois is in the midst of a full-blown Hat Crisis, a seething cauldron of intrigue, fraud, and skulduggery involving the prize Lincoln Hat in the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. According to this tremendous report from WBEZ, which I cannot to full justice to in this blog post, the a private collector sold the hat to the museum, claiming that Lincoln gave it to a farmer from Southern Illinois as a gesture of gratitude in 1858. Even that information remains cloudy-- an affidavit from a descendant of the family suggested that William Waller received the hat in Washington D.C. sometime after 1861. Those reports represent the sum total of evidence that the hat ever belonged to Lincoln and is not just some nineteenth-century hat that some people had lying around in the closet. The Lincoln Hat of Dubious Prominence casts a hat-shaped shadow over Springfield According to the WBEZ article, the Lincoln Presidential Library spent $25 million on Lincoln artifacts in 2007, and the hat was the centerpiece of the collection. As the article says "in 2007, an appraiser valued the hat now in Springfield at $6.5 million
and used adjectives like 'transcendent' to describe its apparent
majesty." In my imagination, this involved the entire board of the Library seeing the hat and determining they must have it during a bacchanalian Lincoln trivia contest and speech-reading competition and paying for it with cash in a priceless period-accurate briefcase that may have belonged to Stephen Douglas. Now, with the Lincoln Library and Museum in some financial trouble, the authenticity of the hat is coming into question.
When historians looked into the hat in 2013, they were unable to find much evidence that the hat had ever belonged to Lincoln, although they found nothing to specifically disprove the claim. This is when the foundation called in the FBI and presumably its top Historical Hat Authentication Team led by grim, black-suited agents, battle-hardened from the never-ending Pancho Villa Sombrero Debacle and at least one of whom has scars from a violent confrontation with someone claiming to own a fraudulent Betsy Ross Bonnet. As WBEZ reports, "two tests were performed in 2015, comparing DNA samples from the hat
itself with Lincoln’s blood-spattered handkerchief, gloves, and shirt
from the night of his assassination, and two tufts of Lincoln’s hair,
among other things." But even these sophisticated tests could not prove that the hat belonged to Lincoln.
Here are some sentences from the rest of the article:
"In an interview, Nick Kalm, the foundation’s vice chairman, said his
organization is still satisfied that the hat is Lincoln’s and that
nothing uncovered by the FBI testing or museum curators disproves that.
He went on to note that with some historic relics, “leaps of faith”
sometimes exist in determining their authenticity."
"Underscoring the secrecy, federal agents were encouraged by the
museum’s former Lincoln curator, James Cornelius, to “disguise
themselves as a news crew” when they entered the museum, [Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Executive Director Alan] Lowe told WBEZ,
based on internal correspondence only recently discovered. Lowe described the overall secrecy surrounding the FBI testing as a form of 'subterfuge.'"
"'I have been on the front lines defending the provenance of the hat, but
I have been doing that not having all the available information. This
is unacceptable. We simply cannot operate that way,' Lowe wrote to
foundation CEO Carla Knorowski and foundation Chairman Ray McCaskey." To sum up, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum may have been snookered into buying a fraudulent Lincoln Hat based on just some guy saying so 150 years ago, and at some point an FBI Hat Crew snuck into the museum in disguise in order to DNA test the hat based on Lincoln's bloody death pillow and absolutely nobody knows what to do with this dubious hat other than the obvious thing-- make it the trophy for the Illinois vs. Northwestern Rivalry Football Game and allow the winning coach to parade around in it. HAT GAME Meanwhile, there is a football game to get to. Illinois, fresh off the worst defeat in school history, is in a traditional death spiral to end the season. They have had another difficult year, one where the most notable thing that happened was Lovie Smith growing a spectacularly grizzled beard and then the school handing out some incredibly soggy bottom boys-ass fake beards. The Beard Out is a tremendous gimmick, I sincerely hope none of the beard recipients tried to eat a hot dog The game has essentially no stakes beyond the hat. Illinois will not go to a bowl. Northwestern has already clinched its spot in the Big Ten Championship game, and the only question remaining is whether Jim Delany would hire a mercenary militia to stop a 7-5 Northwestern team with a loss to Illinois from appearing in Indianapolis. The Wildcats are heavily favored but will also be looking forward to next week's game.
There is nothing on the line except for the Hat, the Greatest Rivalry in American Sports, a knock-down drag-out fight between these two august programs fighting for a trophy. And whoever gets it can hire the FBI to figure out how to put it on their dang head already. I am on the front lines defending the provenance of the Hat.
Let's just lead off with it: the Northwestern Wildcats have won the Big Ten West. There are two games left; Northwestern could spend its road trip in Minnesota lounging on hammocks and its Hat Game against Illinois in a beach resort, zinc-nosed and sun-addled, and they can be 6-6, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them from showing up in Indianapolis to represent the entire Big Ten West. Football analysts, burning out their BCS computers and going through cartons of green accounting visors have all stared at their Johnny Mnemonic virtual reality devices and come to the same conclusion: this is incredibly funny. College Football analysts try to deal with their computer models that keep showing that Northwestern won the Big Ten West This is not to take anything away from the Wildcats, who have had a simultaneously disastrous and heroic season. It is to say that Northwestern has managed to win an entire division championship to the point where they get to wear special hats and get a trophy that I had no idea even existed until Saturday by what has been very close to the absolute minimum number points required. Northwestern will be the first major conference team to win a division without defeating a single out of conference opponent-- this includes Akron, a profoundly shitty MAC team whose win over Northwestern was its first over a Big Ten opponent ever in a football history that stretches to the nineteenth century. Northwestern won the West by racing to an enormous lead against Purdue then failing to score a point in the second half, by beating an at-the-time winless Nebraska team in the throes of its worst season in recorded history by scoring ten points in less than three minutes including a 99-yard touchdown drive to send the game to an overtime period won by a backup kicker playing in his first game, by somehow needing to come back against a Rutgers team so putrid that they had been trying to consolidate their turnovers with an agency so they just owed the entire Big Ten a few interceptions on weekly installments. When you're coaching Rutgers The Wildcats have confounded predictions, statistics, numbers, gamblers, logic, and reason. They have won the Big Ten West through what appears to be the absolute minimum amount of success. For three months, the Big Ten West has been told to get its act together and, with minimum competence, seize the division but no one has; Northwestern's stand is like the terrifying and insidious effects of climate change. And so the Wildcats go into their next two games in the perfect position. They cannot lose. Yes, they should beat Minnesota, a team that is currently thrashing about every week while deciding whether or not to turn into a werewolf. And yes, they should beat the flailing Illini, who remain under a tailspin under Lovie Smith who has just decided to cope by getting grizzled, even with the prized Hat at stake. But consider this: what if they lose? What if they get rowed by the Gophers or the Illini sneak by while Northwestern follows their patented just sort of hang out and see whatever happens is good with me gameplan and then they lose? They can't get taken out of Indianapolis at this point. Jim Delany can't deploy a cardboard Yosemite Sam that says "you must win this number of games against the Illini to play in the Big Ten Championship." And while the Big Ten would prefer to set up road blocks between Evanston and Indianapolis for this game than let a 6-6 Northwestern team play there, there is nothing stopping them. Of course, it would be a giant bummer for Northwestern to lose the next two. But it would also be extraordinarily funny, and the Wildcats have seized the mantle of America's Funniest Power Five Division Winner as an avatar of chaos that will easily carry them over whatever unlucky chump gets served to them in the Big Ten Championship that they are actually playing in (you can look it up) and then head to the Rose Bowl to attempt to win their first out of conference game. RIVALRY It has the sorry lot of Iowa fans to wake up in the middle of the night over the last decade and realize they have a rivalry with Northwestern. They would, like most Big Ten fans, like to have a rivalry with a traditional Big Ten Power like Ohio State or Michigan or even Wisconsin, the type of rivalry where you have a Farm Implement Trophy and songs about how you hate each other and the Big Ten Power actually does despise them back but instead they are forced to deal with Northwestern every year. The Iowa-Northwestern rivalry is not a traditional football rivalry where fans taunt each other and letter jacket guys kidnap the mascot and perform sporting japes worthy of stories that will last for generations at the Grim Waterfowl Club; their rivalry is more like the one between homeowners and termites. Northwestern has now beaten Iowa three years in a row. Each victory has been a disgusting affront to football. Last year, in the midst of a howling southern gale at Ryan Field, both teams refused to score until Northwestern lured them into overtime. This year, they battled to a putrid 3-0 half and basically refused to play offense until Bennett Skowronek made one of the greatest catches I've ever seen from a Northwestern player almost at random and then Iowa decided to close the game by bashing themselves in the head with large, comical props. My sources on Iowa message boards inform me that Northwestern got away with numerous Uncalled Holding Penalties. This is what life is like now, for the Hawkeyes. Their fans do not want to give in and debase themselves to admit they have a rivalry with Northwestern; every year, Northwestern comes in and the teams blow raspberries at each other until the Wildcats ruin their season. In 2000, the Wildcats took on an abysmal Iowa team with an outright Big Ten Championship and trip to the Rose Bowl on the line and they lost one of the most devastating games in Northwestern history. It was bitterly cold, and on the way out of the stadium, Iowa fans gleefully taunted anyone in purple to enjoy San Antonio, taking it as a given that the Citrus Bowl would pass up Northwestern for the more lucrative Michigan fanbase even though Northwestern had beaten the Wolverines head to head in one of the greatest games ever played. Those vengeful Hawkstrodamuses were proven right. This time, though, Northwestern's win, combined with just an absolute Rube Goldberg Machine of Big Ten shittiness propelled them to a Division Championship to celebrate upon Kinnick Stadium in front of disgusted Iowa fans who had, along with every other Western team, squandered an opportunity to win this wretched division. Last week, Northwestern took on Notre Dame in another sort of quasi-rivalry game. There is no way that Notre Dame considers Northwestern a rival: all of Notre Dame's rivalry is with the past itself, a sepia-toned succession of leather helmet mustache guys gouging the eyes of Army or valiantly battling the Spanish Flu; Notre Dame's current rivalries seem to mostly be with the entire sport of college football as everyone else has grown sick of the men's hats of the Associated Press constantly vaulting them into title games based on a stale, ghostly aura only to see them humiliated by a never-ending succession of JaMarcuses Russell. This is how Notre Dame exists now, its pugilist cartoon mascot now squaring off at every fanbase in the world waiting for them to lose. It is fitting that Notre Dame will play today in Yankee Stadium as their football program is the closest thing to every Boomer anecdote about Mickey Mantle made flesh. A middling Big Ten program that resurfaces every dozen years when Notre Dame deigns to play them until they lose and mysteriously vanish off the Irish schedule cannot compete with History. A 1991 image of "Mickey Mantle," a fictional baseball player invented in the late 1980s by Bob Costas and Ken Burns has created a cottage industry of fake Boomer Baseball Anecdotes and must be exposed by courageous people not afraid to put the truth on Blogspot.com College football rivalry fits within the sport's completely discursive tradition in that the biggest marker of a rivalry are fans talking about whether or not a fanbase is or is not their rival. Conferences and schools try to cement these with annual games on the schedule, "rivalry week" showdowns, and trophies, but the concept of rivalry belongs entirely to the fans. The greatest moment in the history of college football rivalry was Bob Diacco's laudably insane quest to build a trophy from scratch and instigate a Big Game with UCF and UCF's hostile indifference to the Civil ConFLiCt. No one has seen the trophy since it was abandoned somewhere on a sideline, ignored by UCF who would not even deign to parade it around. In an ideal world, the complete rejection of this Rivalry Overture would eventually twist its way into a real rivalry, with UCONN coaches bringing larger and more elaborate rivalry trophies to the stadium every year while UCF makes more pointed shows of ignoring it until the Huskies roll up with a semi full of life-sized Dog-Knights while UCF has hired a crew of backhoes to immediately bury them. The other great rivalry moment of the twenty-first century is this: The accepted, Branded Rivalries are the most boring in college sports. Instead, it's the ones at the margins, the ones that are constant sources of bickering about whether the teams are actually rivals, whether one team cares as much as the other about a rivalry, ones where there very nature of the concept of rivalry is contested in a way that would make an absolutely unreadable and dreadful paper called like "'Little Brother' or 'Big' Time Rival: College Football 'Rivalry' and the Discourses of Disparagement in American Society 1978-2012" in PAAAWWWWLLL Quarterly.
The sole exception remains America's greatest rivalry game, the Battle for The Hat and I'm concerned because Lovie would look tremendous sporting that thing with his silver beard.
Yes, there may be a person, huddled in a shack somewhere or in one of those vans that are full of computers where people karate chop keyboards and scream that they’re being hacked by an animated ASCII skull, who has analyzed the film and advanced data that can tell you credibly what the hell is going on with Northwestern football this season, but you can stop right there because I can tell you that it is because the entire program has been subsumed into an overtime cult.
These teams do not play nearly enough for this game to have meaning, but it does. They mirror each other. Notre Dame has a large nationwide fanbase that is the closest thing that Chicago has to a college football team; Northwestern has billboards. Notre Dame celebrated national titles in the twentieth century while Northwestern fans ripped down the goalposts after breaking a record for futility. This meeting will the be the fifth time these teams play in 25 years but for some reason the rivalry has a wikipedia page. But Northwestern no longer cares about victory. They are here to drag the Fighting Irish to overtime, to extend the game beyond the boundaries of time and space, to dwell in Evanston in overtime as the universe is destroyed and reborn over ageless eons. The last time Northwestern played them, Brian Kelly's brain became warped and twisted by the promise of overtime, and he kept trying to go for two unsuccessfully until he found himself in overtime and at the mercy of the Wildcats and their Baseball Kicker. We already live in an insane world ravaged by the ripple effect of overtimes. The Northwestern Wildcats currently sit in first place in the Big Ten West-- this game against Notre Dame has far less import for them than the three remaining games against Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois after another stirring Northwestern win against Wisconsin at Ryan Field, a reliable abattoir for Wisconsin title hopes. The Wildcats can literally win the Big Ten West. They can arrive, with their buses and their trucks and their secret unmarked vans carrying Mick McCall's overtime cowl and conjuring lanterns, in Indianapolis where they can unleash upon the dome an overtime heretofore unseen by college football spanning days, months, and eons, the whole time yelling and fistpumping and trying to figure out which configuration of emojis translates to "Beauty and the Beast" or "There Will Be Blood." All Notre Dame is trying to do make the college football playoff.
Northwestern's brilliant 99-yard drive down seven with two minutes to go and no timeouts to tie the game looked fantastic on the stilted play-by-play slowly loading onto my phone and on the anguished face of the Nebraska fan in my train car scowling his phone like it opened to the website that suggested he must try Malort. I was on the train watching the ambiguous Clayton Thorson text updates because I had left the game when Nebraska was up by ten with less than ten minutes left. The weather was perfect. I did not have to change into a tuxedo for a Function with the Arch Duke. I left because it looked like Northwestern was going to lose the game and I didn't want to listen to Nebraska fans celebrating, doing their creepy sing-song "Go Big Red" chant in the exact cadence as Sloth yelling "HEY YOU GUYS" in the Goonies all the way to the Howard stop, so I left and helplessly watched as Northwestern put up one of their greatest if not dumbest comebacks they've had in awhile on the way to yet another overtime victory because I'm an idiotic sports oaf.
I am very sorry for this
Leaving a game early because of Sports Anguish triggers bizarre conflicting emotions: of course I wanted the Wildcats to win in precisely the type of agonizing comeback and requisite Northwestern overtime that they specialize in so they have a chance to qualify for the Camouflage Pants and Ninja Knife Expo '97 Bowl. But there's also a small part of me that was rooting for them to fall predictably short, to justify my ridiculous decision to rage-quit a live sporting event because evidently it is far more satisfying for me to be right than happy. Almost every game Northwestern plays at home against a Big Ten team is a road game, and it is profoundly embarrassing to admit that this annoys me. The other fans have done nothing wrong other than wear a different color shirt and yell different letters and the only thing I want is for them to go home vanquished and disappointed. It is like when a professional wrestler gets so irritated and anguished by hearing his opponents' entrance music that he stares out of the ring in bug-eyed incredulity except it is real and I can't believe I actually do this. The fact that I missed a ludicrous Northwestern comeback is annoying; the fact that it was against Nebraska is depressing. Northwestern has never beaten Nebraska at home. In fact, only two games have ever been won by the home team in this series and both under insane circumstances-- last week's insane Northwestern comeback in Evanston and the other a hail mary by a Nebraska backup backup backup quarterback in Lincoln. Every year, Nebraska fans flood Ryan Field and even though this happens for every single major team that comes here, the Nebraska fans still find this novel and exciting and worthy of the same amount of discussion that one would find at a meeting of the Congressional Committee on Mileage. This year, Nebraska had yet to win a single game and the fans still piled in ready to finally celebrate a win and figured not inaccurately that Evanston was a decent place to get it. The Nebraska fans around me saw their team finally hire the messianic alumnus coach, the hottest lower-tier coach in the country who had played for the Huskers and knew about running the dang option and then the team just fucking cratered into an 0-5 oblivion.We can all admit that it is extremely funny. But given these circumstances, Nebraska fans, seeing their team finally winning, finally, maybe turning it around, were jubilant and over the moon and I sat there seething like that picture of Jack White at the Cubs game who looks like he been confused his whole life about what baseball was and finally saw it in action. Jack White discovers he had been led to believe that the sport of baseball involved lathes and elaborate bat-crafting phases and about 84 percent less spitting This is the darkness inherent in sports fandom. It is an effect for me that is far more visceral in person than on television or on a flickering illegal stream that doubtlessly infected my old computer with thousands of undetectable viruses that have sent my number munchers high scores to the seediest corners of the Dark Web. It is the appalling and disgusting revelation that once again some sickos and deviants have come to my section with the perverse desire to root for the team they prefer against the Northwestern Wildcats who WON the GODDAMN MUSIC CITY BOWL WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO DO that triggers some horrifying dinosaur-brained impulse to say that I want them to be quiet, I want them to leave, I want them to go home utterly crushed and forced to look their loved ones in the eye and admit they are kind of sad their team didn't win the game. The flip side to Ryan Field being filled at all times with opposing fans is that it rarely occurs to them that they could ever lose and on the occasions when they do it is incredibly satisfying. Their teams only lose to the Wildcats for two reasons: one of the coordinators is incompetent and needs to be fired and Uncalled Holding Penalties. A small sample of the most unhinged Michigan State fans I can find on the internet demanded that their offensive coordinator should be fired after every loss to the Wildcats-- by the third one, I believe they demanded that they fire him, rehire him, and then fire him again while ordinary citizens jeered him with menacing karate poses. One of the funniest things to see if you are a complete idiot and enjoy watching people be angry about football online is to read fans grouse about how wily ol' Fitz has fooled them again with an offensive gameplan while simultaneously reading Northwestern fans demanding that Wildcats' offensive coordinator be fired and then symbolically chopped in half by a distressingly incompetent magician. This is why the most distressing thing I've read this week is that Northwestern is favored by 21 points going into today's game against Rutgers. Rutgers, playing a brand of football so wretched that it appears they have somehow transported players from the mythical first football game to the twenty-first century completely unable to discern the rules of modern football and also distracted by television, indoor plumbing, Instagram, and the relative unpopularity of mustaches. Rutgers fans have succumbed to the saddest fate in the Big Ten: a belief that their team could actually lose to Northwestern. In fact, they seem resigned to a drubbing from the Wildcats. Rutgers players practice for Northwestern by lining up in their signature formation The Nineteenth-Century Conflagration There are myriad reasons why Northwestern should win comfortably. But there are also the Iron Laws of Northwestern Football which clearly state that that the goal of any game above all is to enter that sacred realm of Overtime.
There was a point in the second quarter, just after Northwestern went up 17-0 against the fourteenth-ranked Wolverines when play stopped and Pat Fitzgerald ran on the the field in a one man fist bump bacchanalia, his face and neck as purple as the players' jerseys, when it seemed possible that Northwestern could actually win. There, in a home game, against a sea of gold and a two-digit line and Harbaugh and Harbaugh's pants and his whole thing, the Wildcats came out and not only gained a quick lead but seemed to dominate the game at both ends. But when someone rubbed some smelling salts under the Wolverines' noses and they came back and Northwestern's offense went off to whatever bizarre dimension it goes to in the second half, it also was not surprising to see the whole thing fall apart and raise the familiar question of: so what. Northwestern football fans face an existential question that hovers over the program every year that can best be summarized as: why? I hope it does not seem too defeatist to suggest that the mighty Wildcats seem unlikely to play for a national championship. It seems slightly less unlikely they will qualify for the playoff in its current form or even an expanded form. Even a Big Ten Championship seems more out of reach than ever with the East Division heavyweights lurking in Indianapolis should Northwestern manage to finagle their way out of their bumbling West Division; I'm certain they will do it one of these years when Wisconsin comes down with the flu. But, in more seasons than not, Northwestern's season success seems to be governed mostly by the relative prestige of the bowls they play in, a decision governed equally by their record and decisions made by bowl executives motivated entirely by the amount of exposure they can get for their Named Sponsor, a weed trimming backpack repair company. Northwestern poses with a piece of dumpster cardboard fashioned into the Music City Bowl Trophy No sane person watches Northwestern football hoping for championship glory-- no sane college football fan should, given that about a dozen teams share an iron grip on sustained success, and Alabama has rendered the concept of the football championship into a joyless inevitability. Programs outside the Power 5 have almost no chance to compete for a championship. It is college football's innate impossibility that gives it its joy because the single-minded RINGS focus that hovers over professional sports cannot exist and the entire apparatus governing college football fandom appears to be animated by animus and spite. The saving grace to college football's impossible, top-heaviness is that the sport is insanely punitive; one loss is dangerous, two is catastrophic for any team with playoff implications, and the goofy subjective nature of the ranking process means that a loss to a crappy team can instantly destroy a contender. Fans of the struggling, the down year, and the historically abysmal can enjoy their team's complete and utter ineptitude by knowing that they are so radioactive that they can infect a big brand team and drag them together straight to hell. So while it was unpleasant to watch Michigan mount their inevitable comeback, to hear Ryan Field come alive when the Wolverines' Clay Matthews-looking guy sacked Thorson, to know that Northwestern did not manage to annihilate Michigan's playoff resume from the face of the Earth and their reassured fans were able to strut out of the stadium satisfied that their natural order had not been impugned, for three quarters they all wanted to barf and it was great. Northwestern lost this game too The funniest thing I've seen at a football game was a chorus of Michigan fans inveighing against The Refs in a grand collective harrumph. There exists no universe where, if the referees had a conspiracy against a team in a Michigan-Northwestern game, it would be in favor of knocking the Michigan Brand out of the playoff hunt. The explanation involves Michigan committing more penalties and college football referees being inconsistent and semi-competent. If the calls did tend to unfairly favor Northwestern for whatever reason, that is incredibly funny to me and I would be happy if Northwestern players got away with throwing the Chong Li Bloodsport Shorts Powder at the Michigan lines while the referees were distracted by the scoreboard, desperately trying to see which Northwestern players could successfully name the most Disney films in ten seconds. In the end, Northwestern lost, another scoreless second half, and an alarming blow to bowl contention. On the other hand, a bunch of Michigan fans were temporarily inconvenienced. BASEBALL DEFEAT The Cubs won 95 games, had the best record in the National League for most of the season, and watching them this season mirrored the soothing and relaxing feeling of being hunted for sport. This is the burden of actually watching a good team. For most of my life, the Cubs reliably sucked, trotted out players named Tiff Bungus who all spent September running into the ivy and then spontaneously combusting in the offseason, and no one cared. Then, they started going to the playoffs every year and the whole thing became more serious. The Cubs brought in two starters this season: an ace who pitched several largely ineffective games and then vanished to the Mark Prior netherworld and a reclamation project whose inability to throw strikes went from maddening to almost openly antagonistic. One of the ludicrous aspects of following multiple sports is the strange shifting identity. I spent most of the Michigan game like I do most Big Ten games, mildly irritated at the visiting fans claiming the stadium and having the gall to root for their own teams. But, at the same time, I root for the Cubs, whose fans now consistently invade other stadiums and annoy the absolute shit out of everyone. At the end of the season, when an exhausted Cubs team stumbled towards the end of the season and a seemingly-unstoppable Brewers juggernaut fueled by Christian Yelich's transformation into a skinny youth pastor Barry Bonds collided in a game 163 at Wrigley, it seemed only fair that Brewers fans had taken over. For years, Cubs fans had ridden in Mad Max caravans up I94 to take over Miller Park and engage in absurd, honking Midwestern shouting matches. IN MY STADIUM THEY DO THIS? The Wild Card game served as a fittingly operatic end to this Cubs season. It featured inspired pitching, a Cubs team that appeared to try to hit the ball with a twin-sized mattress, Javier Baez getting away with an illegal hug because it was cute (in this exact situation in the NFL, Goodell would have spent the next day outlining a Legal Embracement Protocol where announcers could slow everything down and say "right there, Joe, that's when a collision turns into snuggling"), and everything but the stadium lights dimming and Tyler Chatwood appearing as the Phantom of the Ballpark aiming a candelabra at someone but missing by 15 inches. The Cubs played in a cloud of controversy at the end of the season. They had some heinous motherfuckers on the team that were not fun to root for. Joe Maddon drove everyone completely insane. A deranged set of Cubs fans became embroiled in a debate over the fucking hitting coach; I have spent a truly embarrassing amount of my life watching baseball and I could not for the life of me name a single Cubs hitting coach until this year because a bunch of maniacs have been screaming about Chili Davis on the internet-- they believe that he went into the locker room and told them in no certain terms to stop hitting home runs. The whole thing would be exhausting except that it is sports and you can always turn it off. This is one of the best things about sports. Because you can spend hours invested in a team and watching with no control as it gets crushed, annihilated, and utterly owned, cheated, collapsing, and falling apart, and in the end you can turn it off and go about your day completely unaffected. What a luxury. MICHIGAN STATE PREVIEW Northwestern plays Michigan State, in amateur football: this weekend.
Northwestern's new quarter-billion dollar sports facility sits under water, only accessible by private submarine. There, athletes have access to the Big Ten's heaviest weights, wettest pools, and cutting-edge virtual reality displays where they take the field to explore game situations from routine plays to extreme scenarios where they are cloned and must destroy the most dangerous opponent of all: themselves. The new facilities will allow players into football simulations so immersive they will cause an epistemological crisis between themselves and their VR doppelgangers with names like Bryntch Laserman Pat Fitzgerald's office is in a hollowed out volcano. It is filled with Northwestern memorabilia, jarring modernist statues of pumping fists mounted to the wall, and a giant lever that he can pull to immediately get blasted by a rotating supply of foreign currencies. This is a small perk by college football coach standards. Jimbo Fisher, as part of his lucrative contract with Texas A&M, is allowed to adjudicate cases in Brazos County Court while wearing a custom Whataburger robe. Chip Kelley is signed to Death Row Records. Nick Saban will now only appear in public while wearing a solid gold mask and any attempt to talk to him will be met with karate chops from his private guard. Northwestern will play basketball in a new arena this season that floats high over Evanston, accessible only by private blimp. Their old arena, a galleon rotting in the shallows of Lake Michigan, will be ceremonially disposed of by Northwestern's Big Ten Runner-Up Scuttling Team. The new arena features bouncier courts, up to seven available baskets, and a series of hot dog kiosk candelabras that can be manipulated to open up secret passages to even fancier hot dog kiosks where VIP patrons can get slightly more mustard. There are fewer seats available; in fact, the new arena will have thirteen seats in total, all for large donors who respond to massive dunks by yelling "I say!" and somehow at least seven of them will be taken by Indiana fans. Northwestern paid Akron about one million dollars to come to Ryan Field and beat them. The Wildcats were favored by three touchdowns. They led 21-3 at the half. For much of the game, the Zips did not only seem unmatched but completely unfamiliar with the rules of football. But football is a ludicrous game and some heinous turnovers, avant-garde pass defenses, inability to move the ball, and a truly heroic performance by Akron quarterback Kato Nelson who spent the first half eluding tacklers only to watch whatever progress he made called back because one of his lineman was flagged for bringing a unicycle onto the field, caused a Northwestern collapse. Northwestern has decided to get serious about their Revenue Sports, and the way to get serious about Revenue Sports is to wave piles of money at them. This cash infusion from television money and moneyed boosters, and the hideous cartoon-numbered Jason Wright jersey I bought in 2004 goes into stadiums and training facilities that are designed to show that Northwestern is serious about football because only a program that is serious about football would spend roughly the GDP of Palau on a facility where athletes can, with only their voices, ask a supercomputer to change the P.O.D. song blaring in the weight room mid-grunt. The explosion of money in college sports is not unique to Northwestern. It is part of a larger trend across campuses. Part of it comes from men's basketball and football programs raking in enormous sums from television networks; this article shows that Michigan got a $50 million payout from the Big Ten Network for the 2018 season, which is evidently just raking it in from the farm implement and extra large men's pants commercials. These fancy new buildings certainly seem like a fantastic way to spend money in any way other than giving it to athletes. But the architectural spending fit with other goals. One is a general mania for building that affects universities beyond their athletic fields; few universities would rather spend money on anything more than building a Ramrod "Rod" Yaarghdarrgh Facility For Business Technology Where Students Plug Their iPods into Bigger iPods. Furthermore, fancy new facilities are a crucial part of advertising and branding-- every Northwestern football and basketball broadcast this season will feature a paean to the new facilities and arena, with awe-struck announcers saying things like "I took a tour of this stadium, Joe and let me tell you, it's really something" with B-roll of Pat Fitzgerald flying around on a personalized jetpack that he needs to Analyze and Facilitate the Development of Football Stratagems. The Tactical Coaching Jetpack allows coaches to soar high above practices while top of the line communications technology allows them relay real-time instructions like "What the fuck is that Horseshit tackle there what are you doing you asshole horseshit"
While it is not surprising that the multi-billion dollar windfalls from college sports would culminate in a ludicrous facilities arms race in a sport run by a combination of bureaucrats and boosters who love to name things after themselves and coaches whose entire aesthetic is dad whose lawnmower has a little too much horsepower, the new facilities at Northwestern can be best described as hilarious. For years, Northwestern's single animating aesthetic in its football and basketball program was the stadiums' shabbiness-- of cold, unyielding bleachers, of legions of visiting fans whining about them, of heroic upsets of Big Ten giants and unfathomable losses to a multitude of Akrons under a semi-functional dot scoreboard. Of course, that was all a fiction-- a Big Ten team is still in the Big Ten and spending unfathomable sums on training and advertising and sending Pat Fitzgerald to talk about Young Men in teenagers' living rooms. It is one thing for an unwieldy Northwestern team still defined by its decades of futility to get boat-rowed by a MAC team; it is infinitely funnier for a Northwestern team with a quarter-billion dollar practice facility. MICHIGAN Now the Wildcats move into the meaty part of the schedule. Michigan has aspirations; they are ranked, they have just completely eliminated Nebraska from the face of the earth, and they are still coached by Football Noid Jim Harbaugh, who has thumped the 'Cats in all of their meetings. Northwestern is reeling after a devastating loss to Akron with their bowl aspirations hanging on a thread in front of a nightmare schedule. The Wolverines should be terrified.
Northwestern football under Pat Fitzgerald has been marked by a tendency to inexplicably lose games to teams they should not lose to and somehow winning games they have no business winning. How many times in recent years have the Wildcats limped out of the non-conference schedule after watching an FCS team somehow lateral the ball for 25 minutes and win by a half point, sent fans panicking by scrutinizing the schedule, and then somehow winning three Big Ten games in increasingly bizarre ways that cause opposing fans to immediately demand that they fire the offensive coordinator?
Last year, Northwestern won ten games. That included a nearly mathematically impossible three consecutive overtime wins; a fourth, in the bowl game, involved thwarting a two point conversion that I choose to believe happened only because Mike Stoops became terrified of going to overtime. That team was about 75 cumulative seconds away from barely qualifying for the Halloween Store in the Mall That Operates for Two Months Bowl. Northwestern football constantly operates on the margins and it is impossible to predict.
There is no reason why the Wolverines shouldn't come in, jog around Ryan Field for an hour, and win by 30. Northwestern has not looked very sharp this season, and Evanston will be inundated with blue-clad fans loudly scoffing. Northwestern's penchant for chaos is by definition unpredictable; if it you could pick the games where a double digit underdog Wildcat team would pull out an insane win, none of us would have to work because we would all be a collection of Biffs Tannen ruling our own communities of terrified gamblers. Maybe it is cowardly and stupid to write thousands of blog-words analyzing football to say the fuck if I know, but here's my conclusion: the fuck if I know.
He got the First Down
